"Beautiful and Lofty Things": Queer Appeals to Power & Turn of the Century Sexology

A presentation given at the trans/forming feminisms conference in Dunedin, New Zealand, on the 25th of November 2015. An expanded version of an earlier essay.

“How could it be unhealthy, that which makes a man happy and inspires in him beautiful and lofty things! His only misfortune is that social barriers and penal codes stand in the way of ‘naturally’ expressing his drive. This would be a great hardship.”[1]

The turn of the twentieth century is widely regarded as an extremely important era for sexology and the formation of the queer identities we know today.[2] It’s acknowledged as the period from which we get the labels, categories, and identities ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, and sexological literature and discourse from the era has a pervasive impact on queer discourse today. However, sexology’s relationship with homosexuality is more ambiguous and complex than a simple and clear-cut categorisation into the homo/hetero binary, and its agents of influence have been heavily criticised both within academia and in queer circles. Today’s talk is in two parts: the first is a focus on Richard von Krafft-Ebing and his work and influence; the second continues a more general look at developments within sexology and their continuing influence on discourse.

In public discourse as well as areas of academia today, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s homo/hetero binary dominates. This model, a “presiding master term” as she calls it, is one in which heterosexuality relies on homosexuality for its own existence and definition.[3] It is often interpreted as a strict, mutually exclusive binary, and Sedgwick does not question exactly how binarised this model is.[4] The model is still useful, however, in noting a particular shift at the turn of the century: “every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo-or hetero-sexuality”.[5] This now significant shift was the result of many smaller changes in ideological thought at the time: from deviance, to inversion, to finally the shift in focus from sexual act to sexual object choice.

In 1886 Richard von Krafft-Ebing published the first edition of Psychopathia sexualis, a psychiatric text intended for lawyers and use in the justice system in distinguishing between crime and disease – the primary way same-sex attraction and behaviour was discussed in the era. Psychopathia sexualis categorised many forms of non-normative non-procreative sexuality, including sadism, masochism, fetishism, and ‘contrary sexual feeling’ or inversion – that is, same-sex attraction and behaviour. The work has been heavily criticised by many people from many backgrounds. Presentist historians, antipsychiatrists, queer theorists and historians alike have criticised Psychopathia sexualis for a form of medical colonisation and for medicalising sexuality and queerness. Thomas Szaz criticised Krafft-Ebing for aiming to “supplant the waning power of the church with the waxing power of medicine” and claimed that Psychopathia sexualis was full of unscientific falsehoods.[6] Some of these are not necessarily unfair critiques, but early sexology and Psychopathia sexualis in particular remains especially worthy of study considering its extensive autobiographical content and its pervasive influence on queer community and discourse as well as on the shaping of our model of sexuality.

Psychopathia sexualis’ significance, for me, comes from the extensive amount of autobiographies within the text and the relative freedom under which they were given. Earlier in his career Krafft-Ebing worked in places such as the overcrowded Feldhof Asylum, with generally poor and uneducated patients who were institionalised more for custodial care than treatment and who had no choice but to conform to medical standard and rule and share their stories involuntarily and surely with less respect and agency. But later and later editions of Psychopathia sexualis contained more and more volunteered autobiographical content from queer men. Unfortunately, these men were from a very singular and homogenous social and cultural class and experience – white, educated, wealthy, aristocratic, bourgeoisie. Krafft-Ebing eventually established a clinical ward in the university hospital as well as a private sanatorium led to more and more wealthy, educated, upper-class patients whose case histories were a lot more autobiographical and who would have had a lot more agency in telling their stories. Oosterhuis notes that homosexual men particular seized this opportunity.[7] Krafft-Ebing as well as Albert Moll, writing soon after, worked with both upper class clients with agency as well as lower class patients and those with otherwise lessened agency. Oosterhuis points this out nicely: “Lower class men, prosecuted sexual offenders, the hospitalised and most female patients were generally not in a position to escape the coercion which undeniably was part of psychiatric practice.”[8]

The primary focus of critiques of Krafft-Ebing and Psychopathia sexualis is one of medicalization. As Foucault claims, the delegating of sexuality to the realm of medicine started with the sexologists of the late 19th century. Our model of sexuality is medicalised because of them, and hard work has been done and continues to be done to undo this influence. However, a brief look at the alternative contemporary models of sexuality and queerness in particular reveals that we perhaps could have had it a lot worse. Urlich’s contemporaries in Britain were also advocating for decriminalisation and acceptance, but the prevalent model and experience of queerness among the British upper class was one of age difference. The ‘accepted’ queer among this class was an older aristocratic man who slept with much younger boys, both aristocratic and from lower classes. Although there were other factors in play, if the influence of this British aristocratic queer had been more pervasive than the German sexological influence, it could have resulted in a very different model to the medicalised Born This Way archetype we have today.

I am not as ready to defend Krafft-Ebing and sexology as a whole as historians such as Oosterhuis, nor am I as ready as Oosterhuis to dismiss the idea that sexuality was comprehensively medicalised by sexology and psychiatry in the era. Oosterhuis, in multiple papers on the subject, seems to believe that medicalization requires the complete, overt, and explicit domination of its subjects, and that as a result the subjects must have zero agency in the process. It seems to be his belief that because of the autobiographical content and because of the way at least those upper-class men were able to tell their stories freely and with agency that the concept of medicalization does not apply. It is true that Psychopathia sexualis and its autobiographies enabled ‘perverts’ and queer men to speak and be heard, and that it enabled voices usually silenced to be seen, and it is necessarily true that such autobiographical content exemplifies a level of agency not typically seen in some interpretations of Foucault’s theories of medicalisation. However, I assert that theorists like Oosterhuis are critically misunderstanding these theories, and suggest that the existence of a modicum of agency does not negate nor preclude the domination or hegemony of medicine and medicalisation. While the subjects may be given a voice, the medical field then utilises that voice to its own advantage – the agency of the autobiographies given by queer men of the time is used to strengthen the hold of medicalisation in the same way that queer men used the medicalisation of their sexuality to challenge the rule of law over their identity.

Because it is very clear that these men knew what they were doing in sending Krafft-Ebing their autobiographies; their appeal to power and the legitimacy of medicine is often made explicit in the autobiographies themselves. A ‘highly placed man from London’ (Oosterhuis’ words) wrote to Krafft-Ebing and said: “I believe that your perspective [that of same-sex attraction being an illness or disease instead of moral corruption] is most advantageous for us” even as in the same paragraph he rejected the word ‘unhealthy’ and indulged in “giving you some more relevant explications”.[9] In appealing to medicine, they strove to shift same-sex attraction and behaviour from the realm of crime and law to the realm of health and medicine – the primary drive in activism of the time, even as the men themselves vehemently denied being sick. In these autobiographies we see a very early example of the phenomenon made explicit by Lady Gaga in 2011: the ‘born this way’ archetype of queerness, or, in more academic terms, the innate or biological model of sexuality. Later editions of Psychopathia sexualis contained many letters discussing the fact that their perceived illness stemmed not from their nature or their sexual identity, but from the social barriers to that identity.

One man wrote in 1890: “Unfortunately, we are considered sick for a completely valid reason, namely, that we really became sick and that one then confuses cause and effect…”[10] These appeals surely had at least a modicum of success: by the 1890s Krafft-Ebing himself was putting his name to petitions to repeal laws criminalising same-sex behaviour; the early protest movements of the end of the century referred to Krafft-Ebing as a scientific authority; and after signing Magnus Hirschfeld’s petition in 1897 Krafft-Ebing contributed his last article on homosexuality in which he stated that there was truth to the opinion of his queer correspondents, argued that it was a condition that had to be accepted, and even attributed an equal ethical value to same-sex and heterosexual love.[11]

The appeals to power we see in the autobiographical content in Psychopathia sexualis are not a thing of the past – today we would probably refer to them as respectability politics, playing to the desires and norms of those in power in order to obtain a modicum of that power – or more likely simply a modicum of humanity – ourselves. The case for gay marriage is a significant example of this kind of appeal to power; moulding ourselves and our relationships to a heterosexual standard to the detriment of those who do not wish to conform or play to respectability. Instead of extending the rights of the married – such as immigration policies, adoption, healthcare and insurance coverage, even simple things such as visitation rights to a hospitalised partner – to those who are unmarried or not in a civil partnership, the gay marriage campaign has simply extended the right to marry. It is worth noting that this particular appeal to power gained so much popularity and focus within the community and without that other issues, such as the wellbeing of queer and trans youth, the treatment of transgender prisoners, the life expectancy and death rates of trans women of colour – have fallen to the wayside.

Money also plays a big part in the gay marriage issue – in California, gay marriage campaigners spent $48 billion opposing prop 8 when California’s provisions for domestic partnership provide almost the exact same benefits – $48 million on essentially symbolic acceptance.[12] It’s also interesting to note that in countries that have legalised gay marriage, funding to queer organisations and activists has dropped significantly – there’s an obvious pattern in the states of once multimillion dollar statewide equality organisations either shutting down or being rendered useless due to a lack of funding.

Appeals to power and respectability politics can be utilised positively, however, even in radical queer activism. For example, No Pride in Prisons is a resolutely abolitionist organisation, but that aspect of their politics is necessarily played down in media releases and social media communications in order to gain the support of the more liberal majority and especially in order to successfully communicate and negotiate with the officials we desperately despise and wish did not exist at all. It has results; during the hunger strike for Jade Follett, a trans woman being held against her will in a men’s facility, No Pride in Prisons remained in the media well beyond the 24 hour cycle that typically decimates activism, making it to the front pages of Stuff, TVNZ, 3 News, and the Herald three times that week and obtaining a significant-length report on the 6 o’clock news. The strike was quickly successful, and this can be attributed to the amount of pressure on the Department of Corrections that stemmed from both extensive media coverage and significant online support. Such coverage and support would not have been possible if they instead sat on K Rd with signs saying “move Jade Follett and close down Rimutaka” – in this case, the appeal to power is not the end game, but rather a step towards full abolition. The goal is not immediately feasible, so we must make sure that those subjected to the violence of the prison system are kept as safe as possible until the prison system no longer exists.

Unfortunately, there is no sign of the ‘born this way’ appeal to power of queer men at the turn of the century being a step in a larger plan, and it is only in relatively recent years that the medicalisation of queerness and transness in particular has begun to be addressed in queer activism; for example in the challenges to the placement of homosexuality and the shift from ‘gender identity disorder’ to ‘gender dysphoria’ in the DSM. Current activism seeks to remove transness from the DSM completely, instead focussing on its placement in the more extensive International Classification of Diseases, where it could be placed in a category of health conditions instead of disease or illness.

Sexology’s initial discussion of same-sex attraction and behaviour in terms of deviance and disease in order to argue that conditions such as inversion, or contrary sexual feeling, were pathological and thus in the realm of medicine as opposed to law or religion lead to the early medico-sexological position that same-sex attraction had two forms: congenital and acquired, as Krafft-Ebing called it, forms of antipathic sexual instinct.[13] Krafft-Ebing also made a distinction between perversity and perversion: acquired antipathic sexual instinct was temporary and contextual; the determining factor was “the demonstration of perverse feeling for the same sex; not the proof of sexual acts with the same sex”.[14] He warned against confusing perversity and perversion, acquired and congential, and stated that there was “an immediate return to normal sexual intercourse as soon as the obstacles to it are removed”.[15] In contrast, congenital antipathic instinct stemmed from a pre-existing taint in particular individuals. In these cases, the ‘homosexual instinct’ overwhelmed the ‘heterosexual instinct’, a concept that prefigures later discourse on the subject.[16] Krafft-Ebing’s model of same-sex attraction included some notions of hereditary taint as well as influences such as masturbation and seduction.

His model was one of morality, “the eternal struggle between a bestial sexual nature and the demands of civilized culture”.[17] This particular area of Krafft-Ebing’s thought was verified by Albert Moll, writing eight years later, who agreed that same-sex desires could stem from either hereditary or contextual causes. Moll however did not agree with or make use of Krafft-Ebing’s distinction between congenital and acquired inversion. Significantly, Moll expanded the contextual causes of inversion to include individuals who may experience temporal same-sex desires: someone “‘seized from time to time with homosexual desires’, even when a ‘heterosexual urge’ predominates within him”.[18]

The next major development came three years later in 1896 with Havelock Ellis’ Sexual Inversion. Ellis did not conceive of same-sex desire as pathological, and heavily questioned the notions of pure or exclusive masculinity and femininity, arguing that everyone possessed ‘male’ and ‘female’ characteristics, and that the proportions of these varied in individuals. Ellis also proposed a new distinction between inversion and homosexuality, in which inversion was innate and homosexuality was the result of sociocultural context (for example, rates of homosexuality would increase in homosocial contexts such as boarding schools or prisons).[19] This new distinction replaced the model of congential vs acquired in his work, as Ellis found it had “ceased to possess significance”.[20] Ellis already was questioning the usefulness of homo/hetero categorisations, calling them “scarcely a scientific classification”, instead breaking down his notion of homosexuality into two forms, one ‘strong’ and one ‘weak’, including men who may have relationships with women.[21][22]

Ellis’ work led naturally to the work of Freud, even though they worked in different fields. Freud built on Ellis’ work and took it further, arguing against the existence of congenital attraction, due to his tripartite model of sexual attraction including ‘occasional inversion’, a preference for same-sex partners under certain contextual conditions[23]. Significantly, Freud believed in a polymorphous model of attraction, under which individuals can potentially desire any sex: “it is something which is congenital in all persons”[24]. This universality challenged existing thought around inversion: if the potential for perversion was universal, then there could be no easy physical indication of inversion, and as such an individual’s sexual object choice was unlinked from their gender presentation. Freud also introduced a distinction between sexual aim and sexual object choice[25]. Prior to this, sexual aim was inextricably linked to social and gender role – if a man’s sexual aim was passive, he must be effeminate – and was of equal importance to object choice in classifying and categorising sexuality.

Chauncey lays it out succinctly: “’men,’ whether biologically or male or female, necessarily chose passive women as their sexual objects”[26]. By the turn of the century object choice became the focus of classification, and due to the universality in Freud’s model, the passive or active sexual aim was no longer indicative of social role. This is an important and large step toward the model of object choice homosexual identity we are familiar with today.

There is a link, as Chauncey points out, between distinction of object choice and sexual aim and the increasing use of the term ‘homosexuality’[27]. During this time the term’s definition also crystallised, referring only to homosexual object choice without automatically implying gender variance or inversion of the normative male sexual role. It is interesting and important to note that this shift occurred significantly slower for women – Freud explicitly stated that social role inversion was a normal feature of female sexual inversion in his Three Essays, the same work in which he unlinked social role from sexual role for men[28].

Earlier sexology, when studying relationships between a ‘masculine’ woman and a normative woman, tended to focus on the ‘masculine’ woman as the invert, considering the normative woman to be performing her proper social role under the heterosexual paradigm of the Victorian era, as Chauncey called it[29]. Under this paradigm the normative woman, who was passive and “decidedly feminine” according to Hamilton in 1896, was fulfilling her expected social role by acting as wife to someone of masculine character – as if she were married to a man.[30] As such the ‘feminine’ agent did not challenge the heterosexual paradigm and was not a major subject of study until the late nineteenth century. It is interesting to note that this relationship paradigm described the ‘masculine’ partner as the ‘offender’, and referred to the ‘feminine’ partner as “the weak victim”, mirroring and potentially influencing more current discourse and ideas around lesbians and lesbian partnerships: that is, the trope in public discourse of the ‘predatory’ lesbian, and intra-community discussions around butch/femme relationships.

By the late nineteenth century these women began to concern the medical profession, and Ellis stated “we are accustomed to a much greater familiarity and intimacy between women than between men, and we are less apt to suspect the existence of any abnormal passion”.[31] This is another area in which sexology’s influence has perhaps remained in more current discourse, or at least in which it can continue to provide an insight. Such ideas are commonly seen in tabloid-like news articles about celebrities, in which any pair of women showing affection are labelled “gal pals” and assumed to be friends. Headlines in such articles can read as ludicrous, such as “Kristen Stewart gets touchy-feely with her live-in gal pal Alicia Cargile”.[32]

Study of these ‘invert/normative’ relationships began to break down the heterosexual paradigm, as both partners were pathologised as lesbians due to object choice instead of sexual aim. The ‘wife’s role was no longer of victim but of active and complicit – however it was not until the late 1920s that it was ‘discovered’ that neither partner in these relationships was ‘playing the role of the man’ when a study performed by Lura Beam and Robert Latou Dickinson revealed that no lesbians in their study thought of themselves as performing the male part.[33] This challenge to the heterosexual paradigm served to highlight the shift toward object choice as the focus in classifying female sexual identity alongside male.

When considering sexology’s ambiguous relationship to homosexuality it is also important to examine possible cultural influences on the literature and vice versa – whether societal or medical shifts in thinking came first. Chauncey offers three developments in American society that he considers were an influence on sexological thinking: the visibility of urban gay male subcultures, the challenges posed to Victorian norms by women, both in the form of suffragettes and in women entering the wage-labor workforce, and the resexualisation of women in mainstream thought that stemmed from these challenges. Chauncey also cites medicine’s rise to ideological superiority over religion and law as influential.[34]

The entrance of women into the workforce led to a higher degree of social and economic independence, at the same time that marriage and birth rates in the middle-class were declining. In the 1880s onward this led to a crisis of masculinity of some sort as women were no longer reliant on men for economic support as well as other unrelated factors such as declining autonomy in men’s workplaces.[35] These challenges and the resulting crisis, Chauncey argues, led to a “sudden growth in the medical literature on sexual inversion” as a way to defend the existing sex/gender system and potentially stigmatise women who were performing a non-normative social role of independence as inverts and deviants. Ellis, in Sexual Inversion, quoted an unnamed “American correspondent” who stated that one of the reasons for the rise in inversion was “the growing independence of the women” and “their lessening need for marriage”.[36] Despite these challenges from medical literature, women in the early twentieth century were gaining more freedoms and experiencing a resexualisation in popular thought – likely due to the increased economic necessity of marriage. If women no longer needed to get married to support themselves, then there should be another draw to it: sexual desire. This shift occurred alongside homosexual object choice being increasingly condemned for women, likely again as a means to protect heterosexual marriage.

An increase in concern about gender non-conforming men is linked to case histories of queer men indicating existing subcultures which were increasing in visibility, especially in New York, and as early as the 1880s.[37] It is important to note that the men in these case histories were identifying themselves as part of these subcultures, a significant step toward identity formation, and that these subcultures pre-dated the medical literature about them – as Chauncey states, “[t]hey were investigating a subculture rather than creating one”.[38]

As such, it is clear that medical and sexological literature was not acting alone or in a vacuum, but was influenced by and even responded to shifting social norms. These areas of sexology in particular are worthy of note and study as they relate heavily to current discourse: heterosexual marriage is still viewed as ‘under warfare’ by the conservative right, for example, and queerness is still overwhelmingly thought of in the ‘born this way’ paradigm exemplified in the pathologisation and medicalization of same-sex desire as well as in the case notes and autobiographies in both Krafft-Ebing and Moll’s work.[39]

Additionally, as current discourse around sexuality encounters more and more fluidity beyond the hetero/homo binary and indeed beyond the additions of bisexuality, pansexuality, and so on, such as the existence of “gay for play” men, which refers to men who self-identify as straight but submit Casual Encounter listings on Craigslist looking for men to have sexual interactions with, and the “g0y” movement, an identity claimed by men who love men but do not identify as gay, queer, or homosexual, and who abhor anal sex, thorough analysis on the construction of hetero and homosexual identities and the fluid possibilities that preceded their dominance is especially significant.[40]

Oosterhuis, H., ‘Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s “Step-Children of Nature”: Psychiatry and the Making of Homosexual Identity’, in K.M. Phillips and B.Reay, eds, Sexualities in History: A Reader, New York, 2002

I use ‘queer’ and ‘queerness’ throughout this essay as shorthand for same-sex attractions and behaviour; however it is important to note that this term is anachronistic and may often pre-date any queer, homosexual, or same-sex attracted identity. ↩︎

“Gay for play” refers to men who self-identify as straight but submit Casual Encounter listings on Craigslist looking for men to have sexual interactions with. “g0y” is an identity claimed by men who love men but do not identify as gay, queer, or homosexual, and who abhor anal sex. For more, see http://g0y.org. For more analysis on the significance of non-queer identifying men engaging in same-sex behaviour, see Shields, J., Para: A Working of Contemporary Parasexuality, Auckland: Artspace NZ, 2015, http://artspace.org.nz/doclibrary/public/JenniferKatherineShields_para.pdf. ↩︎